The corvette landed at Kahra, the modern capital of Mars. This was a city in the Earth style, a Qax-design Conurbation, a series of domes blown out of the bedrock. But only a few hundred thousand people lived here. In fact there were only a few million on Mars, Pirius learned, less on the whole planet than in a single one of Earth’s great cities.

The Martian citizens seemed about as bland and fat as those Pirius had encountered on Earth, though a little taller, a little longer-limbed, perhaps an adaptation to the one-third gravity here. But the officials who processed their arrival stared at Pirius’s bright red Navy uniform. Even here, it seemed, his unwelcome fame had spread, which was why Nilis had brought him in the first place. Nilis said conspiratorially, “You are my battering ram as I smash through layers of officialdom, complacency, and sheer obtuse bureaucracy.”

They had a day to wait in the city. Pirius spent some time in fitful exploration.

But even Kahra itself turned out to be something of a fake. During the Occupation the Qax had come to Mars only to destroy its human colonies. They had shipped the surviving settlers back to Earth—where they had almost all died, unable to adapt to a more massive planet’s clinging gravity and dense air. Even the exotic-matter factory had required only a handful of indentured humans to oversee its automated operation.

So for humans to throw up a Conurbation here, where none had existed before, was an absurdity. There was no Martian Occupation to memorialize; it was an “empty gesture by earnest Coalition politicos eager for advancement,” as Nilis put it. This Conurbation didn’t even have a number, as did those on Earth; it was known as Kahra, the name of the older city which had been demolished to make way for it, and whose foundations now rested under the dull pink-gray domes.

Kahra, and Mars itself, struck Pirius as an oddly halfhearted place—a Conurbation without a number, a world whose most interesting ruin was alien, a sparse population of unenthusiastic people. The ancient stasis of this world, which had given up on geological processing about the time the first oceans were pooling on Earth, seemed to have sunk into the minds of the settlers. Little controversy from this small dead world trickled up the chain of command to trouble the councils on Earth. There wasn’t much news on Mars.

The next morning Pirius left Kahra without regret.

From Kahra it was a short hop to Olympus.

Their flitter landed on an uninteresting, gently sloping plain, featureless save for a massive hatchway set in the ground. Nothing else showed of the Secret Archive above the surface of Mars.